FOR & AGAINST UNITY
Mediating ‘the’ Metamodern in Public Visual Practice
ABOUT
‘For and Against Unity’ examines the epistemic fragmentation of society in the United States precipitating from the postmodern turn. To appreciate the repercussions of postmodern deconstructionism, we must look no further than the emergent crisis in public art surrounding how we represent a ‘public’ progressively divided by competing narratives. By exploring the capacity of visual practice in the public sphere to spatialize metamodern discourse and mediate metamodern life, this research seeks to develop new modalities of representing a public in an age of sweeping incoherence.
Founded on the discovery of uncanny theoretical and practical intersections between ‘the’ metamodern and Dadaism, this paper and project explores the value of studying Dada through the medium of public art on our path towards reconstruction and reconciliation in the post-deconstructive age.
THESIS PROJECT
The visual fragments function to give shape to the meditations and the concepts explored in the theoretical research paper of the same name – not as prescriptions as to what MetaDada visuality will or should entail. Like the early Dadaist performances at the Cabaret Voltaire that consisted of “bizarre readings” from plays, novels and modernistic songs in “every imaginable form of experimentation with rhythm, sound effects and the human voice” (Anderson-Horecny 2019: 2), these renditions are a reflection of an ‘unreasoned order’ (ordre déraisonnable) (Rubin 1968: 12) exploring the dynamic, temporal conditions of America today and ‘the dialectic between old (world) and new (world), real (world) and virtual (world)’. (Cartiere and Zebracki 2016: 8)
These visual manifestations were produced using analogue photomontage techniques in the assemblage of a large 48 in. x 60 in. collage based upon Heiser’s concept of ‘hybridity’, i.e., a set of artistic practices involving the use of a great number of hugely diverse cultural sources to create work. (Gibbons, Van den Akker and Vermeulen, 55) This macrocosmic portrait of American pluralism was then fragmented into forty individual tiles, each of which were digitally manipulated in the spirit of absurdist deep fried memes (see fig.7).
Like de Chirico’s and Carrà’s works, they combine various things and phenomena in one space, and Schlichter’s and Grosz’s that overlay characters and objects on each other and distort the traditional linear perspective via fractional composition creating several points of view. And furthermore, they contemplate the Antagonistic Art of Neo Rauch in the fabrication of a fictitious and uninterpretable narrative that reflects the post-truth and post-absurd reality.
Each fragment of the larger quilt was the product of ‘dismantling and rebuilding’ in tandem with ‘assimilation and convergence’, embodying at once a ‘hammer’ and a ‘mirror’. In oscillating both aesthetically and conceptually between the poles of modern sincerity and postmodern irony, sobriety and playfulness, reality and fiction, between enthusiasm and detachment, hope and melancholy, order and chaos, as well as digital and analog media, these visual units serve as reflections on an aesthetic that is fluid, hybrid and multi-layered, reflecting the mutli-dimensionality and incoherence of contemporary life.
